The online holiday shopping season is coming soon, while peak is expected on Cyber Monday, just after the Thanksgiving weekend. Although online shopping will be a key tool for saving money this season, the quest for an awesome pair of shoes, or the perfect wrist watch could be quite a chore. I was so proud to have launched our new shopping engine lately, but thought it’s only fair to show what other “smaller” players are doing first:

3. eBay has a new shopping interface

A known secret is that eBay has been operating a new search experience interface, in parallel to its traditional one, it can be found in www.playground.ebay.com

Evident changes include enhanced autosuggestion module, more search refinement options, and in some cases a eBay brings to front the main results as shown above in my quest for Wii. Personally, I prefer the new interface, but I leave it for eBay to decide of when to make the switch.

2. There are automatic ways to get better prices

A few of us know that the first shopping engine started as client software. Over the years the industry settled on target sites that make you do the works of searching for an item. Nevertheless, recently I’ve noticed 2 new ‘flavors’ that have been gaining momentum. The first is Smartshopper, a browser add-on that will pop up with a shopping side bar while buyer is looking for goods online.

The later is Winbuyer, these guys have a rather unanticipated business model: they have managed to talk online shops into presenting comparison engine results of other shops in their own sites! In both cases online shopper can just shop freely while they do the work and pop up with savings options.

1. You can do your Shopping Visually

Online shops have already realized that text search can only take them that far, slowly but surely they’ve been adding visual shopping features to their sites. Picitup shop goes ‘the whole nine yards’. It offers all the standard shopping information and, on top of that, a complete visual catalogue where you just point and click. The looks and feels are as if you are in real-life shopping mall.

I typed “High Heel shoes” and went for a test ride:

A left side bar has appeared and has shown a variety of shoe styles and the selection of available colors. I clicked the Jessica Simpson style and got 144 items:

Got back and clicked on the red color to get 91 red items. Further refinements by shape or similarity were available as well, just like in huge shoe store.

Shopping made Easy

Shopping online can save a great length of leg work, but has remained a time consuming effort. These new tools can make it much more fun, by doing the jobs we used to do: they rearrange the product selection for you, do the shopping comparison themselves, or even work through hundreds of thousands of product photos to find the right one for you...

Picitup has developed over the last couple of years a powerful image search engine that extends the offerings of current image search sites. During the past 6 months, Picitup has been operating an image search engine in which users perform image search over a variety of search engines such as Yahoo, Picasa and Flickr as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1- Basic image search for a flower

After each initial search, users were further allowed to filter images of a specific color out of over a dozen choices as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2- Picitup Color Picker

Choosing a specific color would pass through only images of specific color. For example picking the yellow color for the search shown in Figure 1 would filter in only yellow flowers as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3- Only Yellow flowers are shown

Millions of searches were performed and Picitup has decided to release today its “clicked colors” distribution. The relative clicks were calculated using :

The results Figure 4 below, show the relative number of clicks each of the colors has received:

Figure 4- Relative frequency of each color in relation to average

One can observe the surprisingly brown was quite popular amongst the choices, is there an explanation? Well, further analysis has combined the blues, the greens the reds and the grays each into a group as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5- Clicks of Color groups

One can see that as might be expected , the blue and the red groups are notably strong, while brown remains dominant in the third place.

Summary

Blue and red are the most clicked colors, while brown and green should be noted as the most clicked color on its own. This distribution might apply for the colors you choose for you web page or Icons. Further data we are currently collecting might apply as well to colors consumer goods manufacturers should choose for their products.